The artist and the mathematician
on October 19, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, books, Comments (0)
Over the week-end I read The artist and the mathematician (subtitle : The story of Nicolas Bourbaki, the genius mathematician who never existed) by Amir D. Aczel.
Whereas the central character of the book should be Bourbaki, it focusses more on two of Bourbaki’s most colorful members, André Weil and Alexander Grothendieck, and the many stories [...]
Where is the Royal Poldavian Academy?
on October 11, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, general, Comments (0)
Among the items found on Andre Weil at the time of his arrest was “a packet of calling cards belonging to Nicolas Bourbaki, member of the Royal Academy of Poldavia”.
But then, where is the Royal Poldavian Academy situated? Well, surely in the Kingdom of Poldavia, which is a very strange kingdom indeed, its currency unit [...]
When was the Bourbaki wedding?
on October 7, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, books, general, Comments (6)
It’s great fun trying to decode some of the puns contained in Betti Bourbaki’s wedding invitation. Below a photograph, taken on May 13th 1939, of three of the practical jokers (from left to right : Ralph Boas, Frank Smithies and Andre Weil), the others were Claude Chabauty, Weil’s wife Eveline and Louis Bouckaert (from Louvain).
Part [...]
The wedding invitation that nearly killed Andre Weil
on October 6, 2009 by lieven in Bourbaki, general, Comments (1)
Andre Weil wrote about his arrest as a Russian spy in november 1939 :
“The manuscripts they found appeared suspicious – like those of Sophus Lie, arrested on charges of spying in Paris, in 1870. They also found several rolls of stenotypewritten paper at the bottom of a closet. When I said these were the text of a Balzac novel, [...]
maths for aspiring chatelains
on October 3, 2009 by lieven in books, general, Comments (3)
Some French real estate agents don’t try to sell you property, but a dream. There’s nothing wrong with pursuing dreams as long as you’re doing the necessary maths. If not, your dream may soon become an horrible nightmare…
Just finished reading A Chateau Of One’s Own (subtitle : “Restoration misadventures in France”) by Sam Juneau. [...]
Snow leopard + wordpress + latex problem
on October 1, 2009 by lieven in iMath, mac, Comments (0)
Ever since I’ve upgraded to Snow Leopard I’ve been having problems with the webserver.
At first there were the ‘obvious’ problems : mysql-connection lost and php-error message. These were swiftly dealt with using the excellent Snow Leopard, Apache, PHP, MySQL and Wordpress! advice from ‘tady’.
Right now, access to this blog is extremely slow (and often [...]
Grothendieck’s functor of points
on September 29, 2009 by lieven in geometry, Comments (0)
A comment-thread well worth following while on vacation was Algebraic Geometry without Prime Ideals at the Secret Blogging Seminar. Peter Woit became lyric about it :
My nomination for the all-time highest quality discussion ever held in a blog comment section goes to the comments on this posting at Secret Blogging Seminar, where several of [...]
Don’t realize how lucky I am
on September 27, 2009 by lieven in egotism, Comments (1)
After a difficult time for us all, PD1 tells me she finally ‘found her drive’ again : she hopes to finish her 2nd(!) master in fine arts this year as well as her teaching-diplome. Besides, she teaches evening arts-classes twice a week, organizes exhibitions, enters competitions, wins prizes … Looking at the time-stamps on her [...]
Grothendieck’s survival talks
on August 6, 2009 by lieven in general, lazy blogging, Comments (2)
The Grothendieck circle is a great resource to find published as well as unpublished texts by Alexander Grothendieck.
One of the text I was unaware of is his Introduction to Functorial Algebraic Geometry, a set of notes written up by Federico Gaeta based on tape-recordings (!) of an 100-hour course given by Grothendieck in Buffalo, NY [...]
Gina says (continued)
on August 5, 2009 by lieven in general, lazy blogging, Comments (1)
Via the Arcadian functor I’ve grabbed the full text of Gil Kalai’s book Gina Says: Adventures in the Blogsphere String War (part 1 and part 2) and read it on a lazy sunny afternoon.
Arguably the best paragraph is the final one, and, it might be sensible to start the book by reading it first [...]
Hi, I'm a professor of mathematics at the University of Antwerp, in Belgium. My research areas are non-commutative algebra and non-commutative geometry. Sometimes, you can also find me here :
